Chastened by past failure and buoyed by a huge ego, Mark Spitz won seven gold medals, all in world record times, at the Munich Games – then had to flee home the day after his last swim
The best Mark Spitz moments in pictures

Mark Spitz climbs out of the pool in 1972 after winning the 100m butterfly in a world record time of 54.27 sec. Photograph: PLP

His coach rated him “the best all-round swimmer in the world” and hoped at one stage that he might win as many as eight Olympic medals. Mark Spitz’s own opinion of himself was only slightly lower, and he told the world that he expected six. “I analyse my status in each race objectively,” he said in the build-up to the Games. “If I know I’m the best and feel it, and people then think I’m cocky, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Spitz takes seventh Olympic gold in Munich: from the archive, 5 September 1972

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It was 1968. Spitz went to Mexico and failed to win a single individual race, suffering the ignominy of coming last in the 200m butterfly final. Though it was not without success – he was in a couple of gold-medal-winning relay teams – his first Olympic experience was a chastening one. Spitz called it “the worst meet of my life”.

Any number of reasons were suggested: a cold had delayed the start of his altitude training; he had suffered antisemitic abuse, much of it from his own team-mates; at 18 he was immature and overly self-obsessed; his schedule had been hopelessly overcrowded. Spitz certainly turned against his long-time coach, George Haines, for pushing him a little too far and for treating him “the same way as I had been when I was 14”. He promptly joined Indiana University, where James “Doc” Counsilman had assembled perhaps the country’s best swimming team.

Four years later he insisted he was “older and more mature”. “He was a little boy before,” said Sherm Chavoor, his childhood coach. “He has become a man.” That much was physically evident, not just in his more developed musculature but on his upper lip, upon which rested a soon-to-be-famous moustache, grown “because a coach in college said I couldn’t grow one” and kept as a portable lucky mascot after his success at the US trials.

Translating this maturity into greater popularity proved problematic. In Munich Spitz told reporters: “Now that I’m a veteran, people have learned to accept me the way I am,” which was true up to a point. “He came across egotistical and he’s really not that way,” his room-mate, Gary Hall, said. “Mark’s driving force was to be a winner.” But others found the rough edges harder to live with. One swimmer, asked to sum up his feelings at the end of the Games, said: “It could have happened to a nicer guy.”

One of his contemporaries in Indiana described Spitz as being “born without tact or compassion”, and examples of this abounded. When he was asked how it felt, as a Jew, to be so successful on German soil, he answered: “I always liked this country – even though this lampshade is probably made out of one of my aunts.”

Spitz’s first final in Munich was the 200m butterfly, the event which saw his greatest humiliation four years earlier. This time he destroyed his opponents, finishing more than two seconds ahead of Hall, the runner-up, and breaking the world record. “I did remember what happened in Mexico, and I was a little nervous,” he said. “But I’m a lot stronger than I was then.” Half an hour later he anchored the 4x100m freestyle relay team to gold, also in world record time. It had begun.

In the 200m freestyle final Spitz faced Steve Genter, who a week earlier had been hospitalised after suffering a partially collapsed lung. When a journalist asked Spitz what he felt about that incident, he replied: “This may sound terrible, but now I don’t have to worry about him.” It turned out, though, that he did, after Genter made a surprisingly swift recovery. Spitz spent much of the two days preceding the race telling him that he should pull out for the sake of his health. As a result, by the time the race began Genter was furious – and by the time it ended, Spitz beating him into second place with a superpowered finish, he was positively apoplectic. “I just don’t believe in this guy at all,” he raged. “Nothing would have pleased me more than to beat him. But I just couldn’t do it.”

On 30 August Spitz won the 100m butterfly, and 40 minutes later anchored the 4x200m freestyle relay team to victory. His fifth gold equalled the number won by the Italian fencer Nedo Nadi in 1920, and by Paavo Nurmi in Paris four years later – until that point the most any individual had won in a single Games. “You could say I am very thrilled at what I accomplished,” he said.

And with that, it very nearly ended. After he finished celebrating victory in the 4x100m freestyle medley a few days earlier, Spitz had noticed that one of his team-mates, Jerry Heidenreich, had posted a faster split, 50.8sec to his own 50.9. His next event was the 100m freestyle. What if Heidenreich beat him? One of his father’s favourite phrases was “Swimming isn’t everything – winning is”, and Spitz could not have been less interested in a silver medal. “I’d rather win six out of six, or even four out of four, than six out of seven,” he said. “It’s reached a point where my self-esteem comes into it. I just don’t want to lose.”

He told this to Chavoor, in Munich as coach of the women’s team. “If you chicken out of the 100 free, nobody’s going to care about your six gold medals,” his old coach replied. “All they will remember is that you chickened out of the world’s fastest human race.”

Heidenreich and Spitz had developed a rivalry that served to improve both men as athletes. “In a way he always gave me something to chase and I always helped push him,” Heidenreich said in 1992. Spitz finished only second in both of his heats, but when it mattered he beat Heidenreich fairly comfortably, if only by 0.41sec. The following evening the pair combined over the last two legs of the 4x100m medley relay, Spitz diving into the pool with the US team level with East Germany and passing over to Heidenreich two metres clear.

The result, as in every one of Spitz’s Munich finals, was a new world record. After the victory ceremony he was hoisted aloft and carried around the pool by the remainder of the relay squad. “That picture with my team-mates holding me high above them I enjoy more than the one that was taken with the seven gold medals around my neck,” he said. “Having a tribute from your team-mates is a feeling that can never be duplicated.”

Heidenreich left Munich with two gold medals, one silver and a bronze, and became consumed by bitterness at Spitz’s comparative fame and financial success. He committed suicide in 2002, aged 52. “There is always somebody that makes somebody great,” Spitz said after his death. “And Jerry Heidenreich was the reason I was great.”

His final race at those Games had been held on 4 September. Spitz celebrated his historic achievement in understated style that night, going for dinner with a few journalists. The following morning he woke, dressed and walked to the media centre, where he was scheduled to hold a press conference. “Did you hear what happened?” one journalist asked when he arrived. “Yeah, I won seven gold medals,” he replied.

Officials decided that Spitz, the most famous face of the Games and a Jew to boot, was also at risk, and at the end of the press conference he was allocated six armed guards. He had been due to travel to Stuttgart that afternoon to be presented with a Mercedes; instead he was put on the first flight to London, where the following day he posed for a photographer wearing nothing but his swimming trunks and seven gold medals (the resulting picture was turned into one of the biggest-selling posters in American history, shifting over one million units; Spitz got 15 cents a time). “Here we were 27 years after the end of World War II and there were still madmen killing Jews because they were Jews,” he later said. “I was hardly in the mood to do that poster but we went to a studio and shot it anyway.”

By the end of the following day he was back in America. “On Tuesday morning I learned the Israelis had been taken hostage, by Tuesday night I was in London, and on Wednesday I was in Sacramento, sitting in my living room like Johnny Lunchbucket, watching the Olympics on TV as if I had never been there,” he said. “The only difference was I had two secret service guards for a week outside my home.”

Spitz retired immediately. “There is something very depressing about being the best in the world at something,” he said later. “I was programmed for all those years. I swam two and a half hours in the morning and two in the evening, maybe seven miles a day for six years, and during all those hours I’d think about getting out of the pool at the end of the session and how pleasant that was going to be. I loved to think about getting out.”

His final race had been one of the hottest tickets in the Olympics, and among the stars who turned up to watch was the actor Johnny Weissmuller, who had won five gold medals in the pool at the 1924 and 1928 Games before making his name playing Tarzan in a series of films. Another gold-medal-winning American swimmer, Buster Crabbe, had taken a similar route to Hollywood, eventually taking over the role of Tarzan from Weissmuller. Now Spitz, who had arrived in Munich planning a future career in dentistry, was suddenly fending off offers of movie parts. “One thing’s for sure,” he said, “I don’t want to end up like Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crabbe.”

And true enough, he didn’t. “We feel that Mark Spitz will have a major motion picture career,” his agent, Norman Brokaw, announced after the Games. “I can see him playing the leading man in anything he does, perhaps a romantic lead. He’s got all the qualities we want to become a major star.” All, that is, except acting ability. His first screen appearance was as a dentist in a skit on the Bob Hope show, for which he was derided for his wooden delivery. He defended his performance, insisting: “Not even Laurence Olivier could have done anything with the material I had.” All the same, the movie offers dried up.

But there was still money to be made. Within months of the Games Spitz was advertising milk, swimming pools and electric shavers, and working on his own ranges of swimwear and leisurewear. He earned $6m over his first two years out of the pool. “It’s like a game to see how much money I can make,” he said. “It’s just amazing to me. I thought I’d make enough to pay my way through dental school or something, but I guess I’ve caught on as a symbol or something.”

In 1989, after nearly two decades out of the pool, Spitz attempted a comeback, and declared his desire to swim in the Barcelona Olympics. “They’re not going to ask for my medals back if I don’t do well,” he reasoned, and he didn’t. He appeared in two high-profile televised races against Tom Jager and Matt Biondi, lost both and failed to qualify even for the Trials.

Four years ago Michael Phelps won eight gold medals in Beijing and consigned Spitz’s record to history. The former champion, raging ego nowhere to be seen, took his relegation stoically. “He is the single greatest Olympic athlete of all time now,” Spitz said. “I always wondered what my feelings would be. I feel a tremendous load off my back.”

What the Guardian said

Tuesday 5 September 1972

Mark Spitz last night crowned his Olympic feats by winning his seventh gold medal of the Games and setting a record that may never be beaten.

Spitz, aged 22, made his farewell appearance by swimming the butterfly leg of the 4x100 metres medley relay and helping the United States team to win in a world record time of 3min 48.2sec.

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All his seven gold medal swims have been in world record times, and he now intends to “take some time off”.

Spitz said after the race that he “couldn’t wait to get out of that pool”. He added: “All the way down that last lap of the pool, I kept saying to myself, ‘Just a few more strokes, and it will be over.’ Then when I reached the wall, I just went up and over it, instead of swimming to the side of the pool as the other fellows did.”

Spitz, who remarked on Sunday after winning his sixth gold medal that he was not sure that he would again go through all the toll which the performance required, said that he wanted to “go into seclusion for a while”. He said: “I may postpone the completion of my education a little bit.”